Archive for August 2024

Years ago I found a poem about gardening that spoke to me about the work of education. Overtime, I’ve come to see it as speaking as much to the work of leadership as to education and gardening. The poem is “The Seven of Pentacles” by Marge Piercy. I wrote about it as the poetry of…

How many calendars do you have? Of course there’s the one on your computer, the one that keeps track of all the meetings and tasks you need to plan for in a day or a week or longer. If you’re like me, you also have a paper calendar where you keep notes and odds and ends…

In 2020 as the world shut down for the COVID pandemic, I started walking around the neighborhood for physical and mental health. By August, I was walking about three miles a day. That progress was interrupted when I rolled my foot off an uneven part of the sidewalk and broke my ankle. By the time…

University administrators don’t usually take sabbaticals. I’ve heard of a few who negotiate some kind of break. Usually they are very senior people with long histories at their campuses. For faculty, the idea is to provide time to focus on research and writing. Since administrators aren’t expected to be doing research and writing, then there’s…